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I have been using my computer with Windows 8.1 for about 2 months. Now I decided to install Ubuntu 13.10 alongside Windows, basically to dual boot. I got myself out of Windows, and booted from my little pendrive, where I had GParted and I shrank the Windows partition. I made it 100 GB smaller to make room for my Ubuntu partition. I made a new partition for Ubuntu with Ext4 filesystem. I also made a little 1GB partition for swap.

So now I basically have like:

sda1 is Windows Reserved

sda2 is Windows

sda3 is Ubuntu

sda4 is a Logical Partition (or extended? hm, anyway:)

sda5 is my swap.

It is all very nice and OK until this point.

When I rebooted, I was not prompted with system selection. Instead, my computer booted straight into Windows. I made a little research, and found EasyBCD to dual boot. I added an entry for Ubuntu on sda3 with GRUB2, and tried to boot again. Now I got a prompt, but when I chose Ubuntu, it gave me error that is couldn't find "AutoNeoGrub2.mbr" or something like that. So I continued searching forums, and decided to install GRUB manually. So I booted my Ubuntu LiveCD, and installed GRUB in terminal using

mount /dev/sda3 /mnt

grub-install --boot-directory=/mnt /dev/sda

After that, I rebooted, and got a GRUB screen. But it wasn't a menu, just a command prompt, and I did not know how to manually boot with it, perhaps I couldn't do it anyway. At that moment I was desperate, because I couldn't get either to my Windows, nor my Ubuntu. I tried many things with my Windows install disk's recovery cmd, and finally got my MBR and bootloader back, and now I could get into Windows as I am writing this. But still cannot get into Ubuntu, and I don't understand what is the problem. Another thing, now for some reaseon System Reserved partition shows up in explorer, what causes that? :O

So that is basically it, could anybody help me get into Ubuntu?

Thanks in advance!

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  • to my understanding, when you do 'grub-install', it is just install GRUB in the MBR. it doesn't do things like 'update-grub' which searches all the bootstrap candidates and generate a menu for you.
    – t4lwh
    Feb 18, 2014 at 6:28
  • when you have a GRUB prompt, (not grub rescue), it means you have big chance to find kernel images, initrd by yourself. it's just manual steps you do like the statements generated inside /boot/grub/grub.cfg. And if you upgrade drivers, in most cases, kernel are updated, meaning 'grub' too and in a different environment from LiveCD.
    – t4lwh
    Feb 18, 2014 at 6:34

1 Answer 1

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Since I can't comment, this might be a similar answer. How do I manually boot from the grub prompt after do-release-upgrade?
As far as personal experience. I was never able to install Ubuntu alongside Windows 8 and I learned that it was because of a GPT thing.

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  • This is different. BTW, I finally was able to boot into GRUB with some different commands for GRUB, and got to ubuntu. But it was very buggy, my mouse pointer left white trails, etc. I chose to upgrade my drivers, which made my Ubuntu unbootable at all..
    – bp99
    Feb 16, 2014 at 14:18

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